Leaving Barcelona for a family cruise

ROYAL PRINCESS — On our final day in Barcelona, we hopped on board a tour bus and drove on an hour-long, 46-kilometer drive to the mountains of Montserrat, one of Barcelona's top tourist destination. Like the Sagrada Familia, while it is Basilica, you can go to hear mass, but the tour of the minor Basilica would cost around 35 Euros including the tours. You can also take a train, which goes up the mountain and the view there is breathtaking and a bit cold and windy. What surprised me was the great number of tourists who took those long expensive looking tour buses to visit Montserrat.

On our last night in Barcelona, Mr. Jose Maria and Monica Serena who works with the International Marketing Group (IMG) feted us with a Tapas dinner in La Plauta, a huge restaurant featuring the best culinary cuisine of Barcelona. This restaurant is also proud of their Filipino cooks because they find Filipinos as hardworking and easy to train. As it turned out, I learned that Filipino cooks are much desired in Barcelona.

A few days back we had lunch in Nuria Restaurant at the main entrance to La Rambla by the Plaza Catalunya and the Filipino waiter told me that their Paella was exceptionally good because of their Filipino waiter who comes from Laguna. Indeed he was right. Their Paella was extremely tasty that on the next night we went for dinner at the same place.

On Friday night we went to the Plaza Real (Placa Reial in the Catalan Language) at the Taranto's Restaurant or Night Club for an Art of Flamenco show. While the Flamenco dance may have disappeared in the Philippines, it has spawned a new generation of dancers and the Taranto's Restaurant was packed with locals and tourists that paid tickets to see the Flamenco Dance. I chose Taranto's Restaurant vis-à-vis a theater that also featured a Flamenco Dance because small clubs really represent the Spanish Flamenco.

Finally it was time to leave Barcelona for our first ever Mediterranean Cruise. One thing that will surprise you is the number of cruise ships docked at the Barcelona Port (it is called like home, Aduana). We took the Royal Princess Cruise, which is the biggest vessel in the group. But lined up on the port where the other cruise ships, which I didn't recognize except for the Disney Cruise and the Costa Fantasia, a 3,900 vessel belonging to the Costa Lines which once had the Costa Concordia, which sunk on January of 2013.

Just by observing the activity on the port with so many cruise ships waiting for their passengers, I realized that the Port of Barcelona is a major port of destination where cruise ships begin their cruise and wait for their passengers to board. Other cruise ships finish their voyage in the Port of Barcelona. We in Cebu don't even have a single port where a cruise liner could dock. But then unlike Barcelona, whose streets are so well-paved and cleaned by machine equipment every morning, we can't hope to have a port for Cruise ships in Cebu Port.

I don't know why the City of Cebu just cannot maintain our streets and keep it paved and worse, we have a daily garbage crisis were citizens have been complaining that has not been solved! Yet Cebu is proud of our tourist trade, more so that we have an upcoming great airport terminal constructed by GMR.

But I find it remarkable that the Port of Barcelona could service many cruise ships that seem to have docked at the same time. Whenever a cruise ships docks into the Port of Barcelona, it has to be cleaned, serviced, maintained and restocked with food, drinks and what-have-you. All these mean jobs for many people and I'm sure that you will find a few Filipinos working in cruise liners or their ports of call. In short, while we've had more than 30 years of tourism, we still need a lot of fixing to do!

I read foreign journalists or columnists, yet I don't get to reads them complain about their bad roads or traffic in their cities. But we local news commentators find these problems as our daily fare simply because our national and local government officials cannot seem to come up with an American or European quality when it comes to fixing our roads, bridges and cleaning up our garbage on a daily basis.

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